Research and impact experience:

• Engagement with industry, policy makers, SMEs and third sector organisations to understand how different stakeholders perceive just transition to a low carbon future.
• Developing a just‑transition‑aligned approach to Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) by integrating social LCA with qualitative research to better account for equity, agency, and lived experience in sustainability assessments.
• Exploring the basic energy needs of vulnerable communities to ensure emerging low‑carbon systems are designed to be equitable, accessible, and responsive to real‑world constraints.
• Using speculative design and mobile augmented reality to investigate how different communities perceive the impacts of low‑carbon technologies and infrastructure, enabling participants to visualise and interact with potential future scenarios.
• Drawing on co-design methods, worked collaboratively with communities to explore how they perceive urban wild spaces and implications for environmental stewardship.

Methodological expertise:

Qualitative and quantitative research methods and analytical techniques including:

• Participatory workshops and focus groups
• Co-design, backcasting and speculative design methods 
• Stakeholder interviewing
• Public surveys
• Geometric data analysis methods such as PCA, MFA or correspondence analysis

Clair is also an emerging scholar publishing peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Landuse Policy, Environmental Science and Policy, Sustainability Science and Energy Research and Society.

PI Embodied perceptions of low carbon technology on Teesside

Northern Net Zero Acceleration operations board member

Co-I on the 'Basic energy needs for thermal comfort in small island communities' (CDICE Heating and Cooling Network++) (PI, Dr Paolo Cherubini, Island Centre for Net Zero Herriot-Watt University)

Current research topics, looking for collaborators

• Just transitions for sustainable energy transformation
• Social value assessment and its contribution to a just transition
• Basic energy needs of vulnerable communities and the impact of decarbonisation
• Societal readiness assessments for low carbon technology
• Green skills and employability
• Public perception of low carbon technologies and natural environment including nature-based solutions and urban novel ecosystems

Currently funded projects;

Just transition fellow on the 'Growing Teesside’s Hydrogen Economy and Catalysing a Just Transition to Net Zero. Research England Development' (RED) Fund. 2022-2027. (led by Prof N. Dawood and Prof T. Roskilly).

Co-I on the 'Green Skills and Economic Inactivity: the role of Carbon Freeports' (PI, Prof. Matthew Cotton and Prof. Paul Crawshaw)